Prominent conservatives issue report rebutting Trump election claims

By Brian Rokus and Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN

A group of conservatives, including prominent lawyers and retired federal judges, issued a 72-page report on Thursday categorically rebutting each of the claims made in court by former President Donald Trump and his supporters over the 2020 election results.

The report, “LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election,” looked at more than 60 court cases Trump and his supporters filed and lost in six key battleground states. It reached the “unequivocal” conclusion that the former Republican president’s claims were unsupportable — which Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security as well as election officials nationwide debunked days after the 2020 election.

The report was released as the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol has been holding public hearings that have connected Trump’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election to the attack that disrupted Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. Trump is considering an early 2024 presidential run announcement, CNN has previously reported.

“There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct,” the report says.

The report is signed by retired federal appeals court judges Thomas B. Griffith, J. Michael Luttig and Michael W. McConnell, former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, former US Sens. John Danforth and Gordon H. Smith, longtime Republican election lawyer Benjamin L. Ginsberg and veteran Republican congressional chief of staff David Hoppe. Several of them are longtime Trump critics.

“Even now, twenty months after the election, a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time,” the report says.

The report warns that it’s “wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.”

It delved into a detailed examination of each case brought by Trump and his supporters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump and his backers alleged fraud, irregularities and procedural deficiencies in their challenges in court.

Trump and his allies lost nearly all the more than 60 cases they brought challenging the 2020 election results, the report noted. Twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, 14 were dropped by Trump and his supporters, and 30 included a hearing on the merits, it found.

The group of conservatives argued that Trump and his supporters had “an obligation to recognize that the election debate was over.”

“Questions of election legality must be resolved dispassionately in courts of law, not through rallies and demonstrations—and most emphatically, not by applying political pressure and threats to induce Congress to ignore its constitutional duty and the electoral outcome for which the people voted, and which the legal processes of the affected states had examined and confirmed,” the report says.

The group urged “fellow conservatives to cease obsessing over the results of the 2020 election, and to focus instead on presenting candidates and ideas that offer a positive vision for overcoming our current difficulties and bringing greater peace, prosperity, and liberty to our nation.”

The January 6 committee has held seven public hearings so far, presenting witness testimony from Trump campaign and administration staffers that there was no evidence of election fraud and that Trump disregarded warnings that his plan to overturn the election was illegal. The hearings have also detailed Trump’s pressure campaign at different levels of government and his attempts to enlist the Department of Justice in his efforts.

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